TED Talk: How the Other Half Lives (Today): Hukou System & China's Urban Villages

April 2025:

Have you ever tried to register for something and been told, “Sorry, your number isn’t on the list”? I went to the Guangzhou American embassy for a new visa a few days ago, and that’s what I saw happening to a couple waiting in line. But now, imagine that you have to apply for a visa to travel to a nearby city—for school, or for escaping from school, or for meeting a family member, for whatever. And now, imagine that you have to apply for a visa before you move anywhere outside of your block—for WalMart, for Toefl, for work, for chasing I Show Speed, for anything and everything. And on top of that, imagine that whenever you apply for such a visa, 99% of the time you’ll be met with a stamp that reads “Movement Not Allowed.” This absurdity describes China’s Hukou system.

For those unfamiliar, the Hukou system is a registration policy that ties every Chinese citizen to their place of birth. In essence, a Hukou certificate acts like a permanent visa for your hometown, or a chain stopping you from moving anywhere else. Without the proper local Hukou certificate, you’re barred from hospitals, schools, workplaces, apartments, and even buses and trains—because at every step of your life, you might be required to produce your Hukou certificate, just like how a driver would be expected to show their license to the traffic police. If you drive without a license, sometimes your car will get confiscated. If you're a migrant city worker in China without an urban Hukou certificate, you will get deported by the police.

This system was formulated in the 1950s and stayed in effect for over 60 years. And we are still living in its aftermath today. To put this in context, from the 1980s to the 2010s, China was a country rapidly urbanizing, with over half of its one billion-plus population moving from villages to cities. And this all occurred while the Hukou system tried to chain Chinese people to their villages. They did not break their chains, but they managed to move. How was that even possible?

The answer is: they moved to become city workers, without living quite in the cities. They stretched their chain, and settled in what we call urban villages, literally in Chinese “城中村,” meaning “villages within cities.”

Good afternoon. I’m Albert, and I’ve spent three summers wandering through these urban villages; I interviewed their residents, biographized their lives, and authored award-winning papers. I started off naively with the conviction that these neighborhoods were nothing more than dilapidated tenements, reminiscent of those in American inner cities. But as I strolled through their twisting alleyways, shared steaming bowls of street noodles, and listened to their residents’ stories, I realized these urban villages are uniquely significant—historically, culturally, and economically, not the least because they shelter unemployed humanities scholars that I might one day become. But before I become unemployed, today, I’ll share with you a story that spurred my realization.

The protagonist is named Liao Miao. Miao was born in a small, mountainous farming village in Southwestern Guangdong. Arable land was scarce, she said, “so wherever the streams flow to, they carved their farmlands from.” But with a growing population on scarce land, village life was harsh. She was the fourth of five siblings, and grew up in constant starvation. Her only younger sister was even less fortunate. She died of disease and malnutrition. Miao’s village had no clinic, and the nearest was miles away in the town. It took them half a day to get there, carrying her younger sister. They had no cars, and cars were of no use anyways because there weren’t flat roads in the mountains. In Miao’s words, growing up, she had always been looking for an escape.\

Then, hope came the day she heard that a bus headed toward a big city will be stopping in a nearby town. So Miao covered her clothing and cash in a piece of cloth, and walked that muddy, twisting road to town again. She arrived at town, and that was the first time she ever saw a bus. There was a man selling tickets in front of the door, and Miao had just enough cash. So a few hours later, guess where Miao found herself?…Well…she’s back in her bed in her house in her village, she was anywhere but in the city the bus was headed to. No Hukou, no bus ride. The ticket seller simply wouldn’t sell tickets unless one carries an urban Hukou certificate.

This experience was not unique. The Hukou system was designed, in part, to restrict rural-to-urban migration. In many cities, quotas for immigration were set so low—often only two rural transfers per 10,000 urban residents—that millions of hopeful migrants, like Liao Miao, were left waiting. In the 1980s in Anshan, for example, 11,000 qualified applications were filed by rural migrants, but only 2,000 could be approved. After approval, the migrants had to pay exorbitant “urban entry fees” that could cost a family’s life savings. At that time, Chinese cities were expensive and difficult to get into, like Harvard, without financial aid.

Faced with these insurmountable barriers, millions of migrants were forced to forge a new kind of urban existence. As urbanization continued, China’s sprawling cities expanded and surrounded little villages on its periphery. The municipality bought farmlands to build gleaming skyscrapers and transformed these regions into urban areas in the Hukou mapping. But they did not buy the villagers’ houses and the land on which they sat, so that remained effectively rural under Hukou categorization. So now you’ve got these farmers who lost their farmland, but aren’t recognized as urban. To make a living, landless farmers started “growing buildings” instead of “growing crops,” demolishing their scattered, low-density homes and erecting taller, crowded apartments for rental—thus creating urban villages. Imagine narrow, twisting, dim alleyways lined with clusters of “handshake buildings”—so densely built that neighbors could shake hands through adjacent windows. The walls drip with moisture and mold, and above it, water pipes crisscross the sky like a tangled web. Especially in the hot and humid Shenzhen, and in particular on rainy days, walking in urban villages feels like skiing. Shenzhen never snows, so that’s the closest you can get to outdoors skiing.

Let’s come back to the story of Liao Miao. I first met her in Baishizhou, the largest urban village in Shenzhen, and she still did not have an urban Hukou. So how did she finally move to Shenzhen? Well, she moved to its urban villages, which was still rural land, with rural communal administrative structures, under the Hukou system. She didn’t need an urban Hukou to live in a village, whether her hometown or a “village within a city.” She worked at a Shenzhen textile factory, but she slept in a village.

In this way, urban villages are more than just makeshift housing. They are self-governing communities that house the majority of Shenzhen’s migrant workforce; they occupy 50-80% of land in Shenzhen. Think about it: the clothes you wear might have been stitched in a tiny workshop tucked away in these narrow alleys, and the food you order on Uber or Meituan might be delivered by someone who calls one of these villages home. Take Zhejiangcun in Beijing, for example. It’s both an urban village and an ethnic enclave of Zhejiang migrants in Beijing, and its large pool of migrant labor supported a textile export powerhouse that outcompeted state-owned textile companies in the 1980s and 90s. This entrepreneurship was possible because urban villages retained their communal governance, free from bureaucratic municipal regulations. Much like Zhejiangcun, Shenzhen’s urban villages have become incubators for informal economies where low-skilled workers and landless farmers reinvent their lives, building small businesses, street markets, and creative enterprises that thrive despite—or perhaps because of—their unregulated environment.

Zhejiangcun, however, had been shrinking ever since the late 1990s, losing ground to urban renewal projects and its stigma for being a ghetto. The same is true for nearly all urban villages in China today, seen as blighted blocks to be demolished and built into something neat, nice, wieldy. But in pursuing a sanitized vision of modernity, we risk displacing millions of residents and erasing the living history of a city.

Urban village is probably something more salient to its residents than to you, but with my talk, I challenge you to reimagine what progress really means. If you can, engage directly with these communities. Listen to stories like Liao Miao’s. Stop being a familiar stranger to your city, to what we see but never quite understood. Urban villages taught me that progress is measured not solely by glass towers and digital facades but by the depth of human experience and the ability to transform adversity into opportunity. Next time we see an urban village, I hope we’ll remember this talk and its history. Next time you apply for a document or visa, remember to make sure your number is on the list.

Thank you.